TBTropes – Son of Stuck Funky

How Do You Break A Leg Playing High School Girls’ Soccer?

Back when I owned a Sega Genesis (and the Sega Genesis was still current), there was an obscure but riotous game called Mutant League Football.

It was an over-the-top, super-violent version of American football. It was even more extreme than the later NFL Blitz. It was also a pretty good football game. It was so good, it was easy to forget how silly it was.

MLF was arguably better than the Madden series, which was primitive at that time. MLF was certainly more fun to play. Except that you had to play head-to-head; the vs. computer mode wasn’t much fun. My college roommate, friends, and I played Mutant League Football against each other like people play Madden nowadays, and like we played NHLPA Hockey ’93 at the time. We took it seriously.

MLF had a feature where you could bribe the referee, and he would call a stupid penalty on your opponent. This only worked once per game, so the secret was saving this for when you needed it. There is nothing more infuriating than getting a critical defensive stop on a 3rd-and-3, and then getting a 5-yard penalty for flicking boogers. The term “rage quit” didn’t exist yet, but I caused one or two. I hope the 2017 remake kept that feature.

I tell this story because of today’s strip:

Trinity Rodman is an elite professional women’s soccer player who also plays on the U.S. National Team. And, yes, she’s the daughter of basketball’s Dennis Rodman.

What post-apocalyptic mutant soccer league does this man’s daughter play in that gave her a broken leg? Not a sprain, not a foot fracture, a full broken leg. Soccer is not a violent sport! Especially not at the level of competition that exists in Westview/Centerville, which is Class A high school at best. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but that would be a pretty severe injury.

When characters under-react to something that is blatantly strange or unusual, TVTropes calls it an Unusually Uninteresting Sight. There are ways to justify this reaction, but none of them exist here, or anywhere in the Funkyverse. If anything, the Funkyverse runs on Unusually Uninteresting Sight. Characters don’t react at all when they’re being blatantly abused, attacked, exploited, manipulated, shown bizarre things, and left to die from untreated cancer.

Or, as we’ll see in the second panel, insulted.

In the unedited strip, Pam says “I’m sorry to hear that! How is she?” to which the man responds as seen above. I can appreciate that some people struggle to pick up social cues, but how oblivious can you be? Pam clearly meant “how is your daughter’s recovery going?” even if she didn’t say those exact words.

Pam showed empathy (in what’s basically a phatic conversation anyway), and the man throws it back in her face with a pedantic, unfunny response. It would be much more effective – and, dare I say, fewer inches away from reality – if Pam recognized this insult, and responded accodringly. The man was so eager to make a joke that he deliberately ignored the obvious subtext.

I often talk about the Comedy Disconnect, which is when the writer sacrifices reality in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs. I’ve further noticed that Tom Batiuk loves to do this when it’s completely unnecessary.

We don’t know who this man is, or who Lizzy is. (Unless he’s some Act I bit player Batiuk expects us to remember.) His opening line could have been “my son broke his leg playing high school football”, which is a far more plausible scenario. The rest of the strip could have played out the same way. Which still isn’t a joke, but let’s solve one problem at a time here.

Pam recognizing and responding to this insult is a perfectly workable second panel. In fact, my edited version of strip has two jokes in it – which is two more than the unedited strip has.

And this is a common problem in Act III/Act IV. Last week’s “Crankshaft juggles choir practice and the bowling championship” arc had multiple Comedy Disconnects that didn’t need to exist at all.

November 11: Crankshaft says “my father taught me how to play the ukelele when I was little.” This would have been about 1925-1930, when the ukelele was barely known in the United States. This could have been any musical instrument. Keep in mind that Crankshaft could not read yet.

November 15: Dinkle is annoyed that Crankshaft put a bowling team logo on the back of his choir robe. This ignores the fact that we’ve seen Dinkle raising money for choir robes on multiple occasions. The punchline could have been Dinkle handing Crankshaft a bill for the replacement cost. Which also would have kept Dinkle in character.

I came up with my own name for this more specific version of Comedy Disconnect:

Toxic Filler: When filler text inadvertently undermines the story.

Beating A Joke To Death

One of the drawbacks of my long-running TBTropes series is that the tropes have begun to repeat themselves. This was part of the design, though. I wanted to create a way to describe Tom Batiuk’s bizarre writing choices, so we can identify each when it appears. But this has made it harder to write new blog posts, because I’ve already explored the Batiukian technique de la semaine.

Like I said in the comments, I didn’t write about Buck Rub Week (October 13) or Crankshaft Lawyers Up Against Glitter Week (October 20), because I did almost two years ago. Almost everything in If You Make Sure You’re Connected, The Writing’s On The Wall applies perfectly to these two weeks of Funky Crankershaft.

I called this a Comedy Disconnect: “trying to be funny rather than communicate ideas, (sacrificing) reality in a desperate attempt to get laughs at all costs.” Which Batiuk does constantly. Despite routinely describing his life’s work in terms like “45 years in, ‘Funky Winkerbean’ creator isn’t going for funny.” He’s going for funny, but he certainly isn’t hitting it.

And we’ve got another reuse of an old technique this week: reusing a joke when it no longer makes any sense.

In Fight The Power, I wrote about how Batiuk continues to rely on Dinkle jokes long after the world changed in ways that rendered them problematic. Maybe high schoolers and high schools in the 1970s and 1980s had to silently tolerate Dinkle’s behavior. But senior citizens and churches in the 2020s do not. The environment changed, and the times changed. Act I Dinkle worked as a comically exaggerated depiction of megalomaniacal high school band directors. Now he just looks like a pushy, abusive lawsuit magnet.

Imagine a shot-for-shot remake of a classic teen/young adult comedy like Dazed And Confused or Fast Times At Ridgemont High or Revenge Of The Nerds set in the current decade. But it doesn’t update any of the outrageous details of life circa 1976-1983, or introduce anything that’s changed since then. This trope already has a name: Harsher In Hindsight. But since Batiuk loves to do this to his own work, I’ll give it its own name:

Not Funny Anymore: When a once-functional joke no longer works because the context around it has changed.

Harry Dinkle is Not Funny Anymore. Ed Crankshaft is Not Funny Anymore. And the Pizza Box Monster is Not Funny Anymore.

This is Halloween week. In Act III, PBM showing up at Halloween and terrorizing Montoni’s was one of the few fun things that happened in Funky Winkerbean. But the new reality is that PBM is now Pete and Mindy’s business partner. This reframes the underlying dynamic of “PBM is scary, because nobody knows who he really is.”

On Tuesday, Pete tells Mindy “you need to stop obsessing over who the Pizza Box Monster is.” No, Pete, you need to start obsessing over it. Because you’ve apparently entered into a business relationship with this person, and talked your fiancée into joining! Putting your trust, your financial future, and by extension your marriage, into the hands of an unknown person who wears a wacky costume, is skull-collapsingly stupid.

Never mind that this situation isn’t even possible anymore. Know Your Customer laws require any financial institution to thoroughly identify all parties early in the proceedings. And any party in the partnership would have the right to view any contracts they’ve signed. Mystery solved.

But it gets worse. Does Pete simply not care who the Pizza Box Monster is? Or does he know who it is, but isn’t telling Mindy? Because that’s a great way to destroy your spouse’s trust in you.

In a downstream joke that’s also Not Funny Anymore, Pete tells Mindy she’s beginning to sound like her grandfather Ed Crankshaft. The only reasonable response to that is an immediate trip to a neurologist. A young woman should not be talking like a 106-year-old dementia patient. Especially if Batiuk is going to act like Pete and Mindy are a generation younger than they actually are. Even more so when it overlaps with Dumbass Has A Point. Mindy is right to want to know this person’s identity, even if she doesn’t know why.

The scariest thing Pizza Box Monster could do this week is send Pete and Mindy a picture of himself in Russia with their life savings. Or even worse: their merged comic book collection. I guess they’d have to actually get married first, though.

Payola And Kennedy

Since the Winnipeg Blue Bombers ~~week~~ ~~month~~ ~~year~~ endless arc has begun, it’s a good time to talk about a Funkyverse concept I’ve been wanting to give a name to. This is another installment in my TBTropes series.

“Payola” was the practice of individuals accepting money to play certain songs on the radio. It was the early days of mass media, and radio DJs found they were well-positioned to accept bribes from record companies who wanted their work on the airwaves. A similar concept was “plugola,” which was a product endorsement done outside the traditional advertising arrangement. Congress started putting an end to these practices in 1959, at the same time they went after against rigged TV game shows.

This isn’t really what Tom Batiuk does in his comic strips, though. Poster The Drake of Life nailed his motivation:

I assume TB is a fan because someone related to the team paid him a tiny bit of attention and he glommed onto it desperately.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2025/07/18/we-were-all-thinking-it/#comment-176917

I believe this also. But neither “word “plugola” nor “payola” works to describe all the corporate logos, borrowed intellectual property, and childhood favorites that that drive plots in Funky Winkerbean and its spinoffs. Batiuk isn’t getting money under the table to do this. I’ve invented the following TBTropes term to describe it instead:

Egola: any plot element in the Funkyverse that exists to indulge Tom Batiuk’s ego.

I gave it the same -ola ending. It’s pronounced with emphasis on the E, rhyming with “Ricola” from those TV commercials.

Let’s list some examples of Egola in the Funkyverse:

Winnipeg Blue Bombers
Ohio Music Educators Association convention
Ohioana Book Fair
The Phantom Empire
The Flash
other comic book properties he likes, like John Howard’s Batman logo t-shirt and the Superman art during last week’s interview
San Diego Comic-Con
the negative renaming of companies Batiuk doesn’t like, like FleaBay and Toxic Taco
stories where the characters pretend to share Tom Batiuk’s own shallow opinions, like “climate damage” and school tax levies
Plots about Lisa’s Story, which is really just promotion for Batiuk’s own real-life books about it
Montoni’s, in its role as a stand-in for Luigi’s pizza of Akron, Ohio
The entire book publishing process, as depicted. Which, according to Tom Batiuk is: declare self “good writer”; write book off-panel; get agent; design cover; do book signings; do interviews; do more book signings; win awards; do more book signings; design more covers; win more awards; repeat.
The entire character of Batton Thomas
Especially his endless, insufferable interview with Skip Rawlings. (Holy cow, how big does your ego have to be to think that two dinner meetings isn’t enough time to interview you properly?)

Drake of Life went on to say:

Think he’ll bother to make up a story about why Jff’s a fan?

I don’t think he will. Even though it would be stunningly easy to justify Jeff’s interest in the CFL instead of the NFL: he’s from Cleveland. I’m sure the woebegotten Browns have driven plenty of people to get behind teams like the St. Louis Battlehawks rather than the local team. (And I root for an NFL team whose last big game was the plot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.)

Exploring Jeff’s thought process could be great fun. There’s a whole Internet culture of football fan bases poking fun at each other, like Drew Magary’s “Why Your Team Sucks” series, and YouTube creators like UrinatingTree and BenchwarmerBran. You could do that kind of story here.

Instead, Pam and Ed have been talking to Jeff like he’s Rain Man having a fit about missing Judge Wopner. “It’s still in the wash”? He was wearing it the last 15 times we’ve seen him! This is an excuse you’d give your two-year-old who’s upset about misplacing a stuffed animal. I wonder how bad this is going to get.

(Canonical side note: if it’s true that this is Jeff’s “game shirt”, that means anytime he’s wearing it, he’s trying to watch a Blue Bombers game. Go back and read that “Ed dials his own cell phone” Sunday strip again, and imagine Jeff is a football addict who’s being distracted from his precious game. Gives it some of that subtext it needed, doesn’t it?)

Synesthesia II

Don’t forget to vote in the 2024 Crankshaft awards! See a list of nominees here. Vote here.

It’s time for another visit to Tom Batiuk’s wacky blog!

In Match To Flame 221, we get the continuation of Batiuk’s trip to North Carolina. During this trip, he discovered he has synesthesia, but didn’t realize this was the only interesting thing that happened to him. Nor did he care enough to learn that the condition had a name.

Do Explain The Joke

This past week of Crankshaft was so bad, I had to write two posts about it. The first post was here. This second one will focus on the alleged joke-writing. Beware, the comedy disconnects are everywhere.

A comedy disconnect happens when a writer sacrifices reality and ideas in pursuit of a laugh. Tom Batiuk doesn’t really sacrifice reality and ideas; he never introduces them in the first place. We’ll soon see how.